Tag: Personal

And then ‘What’s Left’ came into focus and changed everything before it

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By the time the ebooks were published, I had remarried and settled into our little city farm on the New Hampshire seacoast, the one with the red barn that gives this blog its name. My life had stabilized and my job wasn’t devouring me alive, unlike my previous lower-level management positions.

But something kept nagging at me. I wanted to know just where the hippie movement had gone. Many of the insights have been posted here at the Red Barn, and I did draft a series of essays – Hippie Hopscotch – for a book competition that was cancelled after I sent my entry off. My conclusion is that the hippie impact is still around in many varied streams, much of the legacy taken for granted in contrast to the mass-media stereotypes or the current teens’ perception of hippie as being a girl thing. My wife and stepdaughters kept asking about the era and were astounded to hear just how much had changed for the better because of it. They were incredulous at the restrictions I had faced. Were things really as bad as Mad Men presented them? Yes, and the show had me retasting the first newspaper I worked for, the one that came closest to major metro. I mean, I could almost smell it.

Could any of this earlier work be salvaged? And what could I do with the searing childhood betrayal piece published online in Hobart?

My first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers, had ended with Kenzie’s return to Indiana. Intuitively, I had him, as a Tibetan Buddhist lama reincarnated into Iowa, marrying into a Greek-American family in Daffodil. I saw it as a way of blending two streams of ancient wisdom – one Asian, the other at the origins of Western culture. Something still felt incomplete in that ending.

Rather than trying to pick up the story with Kenzie himself two decades later, I decided to shift the focus to the next generation, which led me to create a daughter. This would be her story. As an added twist, I decided to have her lose him, not to divorce but an avalanche in the Himalayas, when she was just 11.

Unlike my earlier fiction, this one was undertaken totally in my retirement years. Yes, I had the ending of Hitchhikers as my prompt – and, based on that, some characters and a setting to work from – but this book would be done with fewer external demands than I’d faced in working on the others in my “spare” time.

Surprisingly, this became the hardest of all to bring to fruition, undergoing nine thorough revisions. In one version, there were no quotation marks. Another changed the tenses.

No quotation marks? Since she was relating the story anyway, including what other people had told her, who knows how accurately she repeated them. Blame Cormac McCarthy as a bad influence there. It was one flash of brilliant inspiration that ultimately proved confusing. Now, how many quotation marks did I eliminate in one sweep and how many did I have to insert as repairs? Both times, it involved a lot of keystrokes.

The focus shifted greatly, too.

At first, it was on what she uncovered about her father and his times. He was a hippie, after all, so we would see the hippie scene through her perceptions of his photographic record of people and events. In the next revision the focus turned to what had attracted him to join her extended family, one so different from his own roots. That led me to questions of just what a family is – a pretty slippery concept in today’s America – and then an examination of Greek-American culture in the Midwest itself. Finally, the focus was entirely on her, period, starting with her stages of adolescent grieving and emotional recovery.

I was a bit spooked when she began talking to me through my fingers as I was typing. She was snarky, too. Talking? She was dictating. Even scarier, she sounded a tad like my younger stepdaughter.

And it wasn’t just when I was up in my third-floor lair. Sometimes she talked to me while I was swimming laps or weeding the garden.

At some point this was no longer about a distant past, in her eyes at least, even when those roots impacted the present and its conflicts. By now, I was watching her grow up with each revision as she gained a snide, seemingly cynical tone and a goth appearance. I wish I had answers or at least advice for where she and her generation of the family wind up at the end of the book, but we do know what their options are.

The book also evolved into a multigenerational affair, reaching back to her great-grandparents and later jumping ahead to her nieces and nephews within a large, tightly knit extended family.

How to structure this baffled me until I came upon the way Jonathan Lethem handled a multigenerational novel that built on four sections of four chapters each, like a mosaic. Mine has five generations at play, once you include Cassia’s nieces and nephews, but the structure holds. Somehow it works differently than the traditional chronology of twenty-some chapters.

One of the 16 chapters, the subway ride to the Brooklyn art museum and its Tibetan galleries, comes from a lengthy outtake from a Hitchhikers draft, this time two or three decades later with Cassia, the daughter, rather than her father.

I should also admit that the title remained elusive. One I liked, Cassia’s Quest, got shot down for sounding more like a space journey. Another, in desperation, Diana’s Daughter pushed Kenzie out of range. What’s Left results as a double entendre, addressing both her situation and the manuscript itself.

Finding a suitable cover image was equally challenging. I liked a failing egg yoke as a reference to her being broken open and to her family’s restaurant. Photos of a grieving child or young woman never quite fit the physical description in the text itself and also failed to reflect the span from early adolescence into her 30s.

~*~

The project also had me reconsidering my own experiences.

Was I really ever a hippie? In my promotions for the novels, I contended that we came in all varieties and nobody fully fit the stereotype. That was, in fact, a central thrust of my novels, even when hippies are nowhere to be found, as was the case in Hometown News.

In the background, the local Greek Orthodox church opened the faith and culture to my curiosity. As I’ve discussed in posts here at the Red Barn, what I encountered was quite different from my Quaker simplicity but definitely enriched it, not just theologically but as in the traditional dancing, music, and food.

It was a good thing that I didn’t encounter the novels of the masterful Jeffrey Eugenides until after What’s Left had been published. I would have been too intimidated otherwise.

In addition to Jonathan Lethem, writers of inspiration during this project included Poppie Z. Bright, Anne Rice, and John Irving.

~*~

Not only was this the most difficult of my novels to writer, with deep revisions, but the central character, the snarcastic Cassia, had me rethinking everything that had gone before. She ordered me to revise the earlier books. Or else?

One of the advantages of ebooks is that new versions can be published rather easily. In this case, as you’ll see, she had my hippie books getting new titles, many characters getting new names, and many of the stories themselves being vastly enhanced.

All from what I jokingly called my culminating novel.

And that was before I returned to the others.

Here I had finally found myself in my goal of being free from the newsroom and having time to focus more fully on my “serious” writing. I just didn’t imagine it like this.

I still held a fondness for the hippie movement and its hopes but could clearly admit I had moved on. That part was liberating.

I’m still looking for that better world, though, as you know.

So here I was, back to the drawing board.

Finally, I turned the camera on the newsroom

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My novel about small-market journalism originated as an experiment on my first PC, an off-brand back in the days before hard drives or the Internet. In this case, I decided to build a book as a series of variations on a theme relying on a template chapter that I then copied and pasted for development. Set in a newsroom, each day was the next day’s edition but sampled months down the road. Some of you may think of the movie Groundhog Day, but that was still seven years in the future. The key to the book’s development was a set of seemingly random search-and-replace possibilities I then ran through the manuscript – on both of the 5.25-inch floppy disks that were required for the full book. Other variations required physical input, one by one. Either way, think of Mad Libs with seemingly random repetitions popping up like loose threads through the entire tale.

The basis, of course, was a composite of several of the newspapers where I had worked. By extension, it could also represent offices anywhere, but I found myself thinking about how little we usually know about our coworkers. Often, it doesn’t go much deeper than a phrase they repeat all the time or a piece of their favorite clothing or some annoying habit they have. It was enough to sketch each of them through the rounds of the book.

And then I put it aside to season before tackling it again.

When I returned afresh, I had to admit that the variations were insufficient. The loops were, uh, loopy. By then, the revision was turning into a kind of paint-by-numbers to flesh out the bones.

The tale still needed more work. So much for my pioneering experiment with A.I.

~*~

Hometown News did take my fiction in a fresh direction. It wasn’t exactly countercultural, for one thing. And it took place largely within a workplace, with day-to-day drudgery many people might identify with or at least recognize.

While Kenzie in my hippie novels labored as a photographer on his campus newspaper and then on a small-town daily chronicle, he did move on to higher pursuits once he married. In contrast, when my savings ran out, I was back in the newsroom.

Another surprise as I look back. This manuscript was also in the works before my Baltimore sabbatical big writing spree opened.

I have memories of jotting down notes while driving Interstate 95 between sales calls in Connecticut. My time on the road and in motels left me plenty of opportunity for uninterrupted thinking.

Even with TV shows like Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore, the public had little idea of what really happens in a newsroom. At the time, the job carried some prestige, if not outright fear.

There was an adage that every newsman had a novel waiting to be born, and there was the cliché of the crusading reporter battling corruption and crime. Even Clark Kent and Lois Lane of Daily Planet renown. Mine wouldn’t be anything like those. The villains weren’t politicians or mobsters but, in the ultimate view, capitalism itself. And here I was, cheering for small, local enterprise.

For me, what emerged is the most problematic of my published novels, yet one of the most fertile. It certainly has the darkest humor and a large dose of dystopia.

I do recall one newspaper editor who candidly admitted to having taken a popular genre novel and essentially written over it to launch his own successful line of commercially published successes. Should I note that the owners of his newspaper also had one of the top book publishing houses in the world? Connections? Don’t discount them. Just don’t think of them as literary success, which I was aspiring to.

Rather than having the high drama of big bad guys somewhere outside of the newspaper company, mine were more insidious. In my experience, though, a more pervasive conflict smoldered behind the scenes within the business itself between the journalists, on one side, and the bean counters and their bottom line of obscenely rich profits, on the other. As the saying went at the time, many newspapers were a means of printing money for their owners. Not that much of it ever got down to the workers.

Let’s just say, too, that some papers were more competitive and innovative than others.

In my job of calling on editors across the Northeast, I heard personal stories that added to my own insights from working within two dailies that had undergone major transformations under inspired leadership, as well as lessons from leading a small paper in the town I call Prairie Depot and some stints elsewhere. Let’s skip the rest of the resume and get on with the book.

It was a world all its own. Or so I thought. And yes, it was set vaguely somewhere in the American Midwest.

Check it out at my Jnana Hodson author page at Smashwords.com.

More than volcanic ash spewed out from my days in the Pacific Northwest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Stephen King has advised novelists to have only one Big Idea in a book, but I came across that way too late to put it into practice. (Maybe if I ever tackle another novel?)

As I hunkered down in my self-imposed sabbatical in Baltimore – or was it self-incarceration or even cloistered? I did little else – my attention eventually turned to a more recent span of my life than the Kenzie novels covered. It was time to consider my nearly ten years of marriage and its breakup. If only I really knew how to star in it.

I thought that this next book would be about the most heavenly time and place imaginable, but as I typed and would eventually see, the real story was about a deeply troubled marriage, with me holding the debris after it blew up and a whirlwind romance afterward left me in a fog where I was.

So courtship, marriage, and relationship per se were one big subject. (Idea, in King’s expression, feels too refined.)

The other was the Pacific Northwest as seen from the other side of the Cascade mountains in Washington state, a land that is essentially desert rather than rainy gray Seattle.

One was something many people had some familiarity with, but the other was what I found more enticing as a writer. Besides, I had written many landscape poems I could draw from. Swami’s insight from her first visit to India, that the reason Hinduism had so many gods was a reflection of the ways each locale had a distinct vibe. The Yakima Valley and the Cascades were unlike anything I had experienced in the eastern half of the U.S. Especially the vast spaces you never see in a movie or read about in a book. And there I was with my new bride.

My inner drive was to better understand – and remember – the events leading up to what I thought was near perfection, my Promised Land. Except that it all blew up after four heady years, and we retreated eastward in haste. Now, six years later, I was trying to make sense of everything, and writing is my primary tool of thought.

One big hurdle was that I still had too many unresolved issues to provide clarity on the relationship struggles. I couldn’t see that the darling I thought every reader would find fascinating was, in a wider view, dislikable.

The plot – and the manuscript – kept growing by the proverbial pound.

Baltimore for me was so many lonely nights broken periodically by sex that wasn’t with my beloved. The whirlwind who came after the marriage. The one others have called my one true love. If only she had been true.

~*~

I really should go back to my journals to get a clearer sense of what I was going through both as I drafted it and also during its revisions. I suspect the reality would be painful, even embarrassing, and as I write this, those volumes are wrapped in plastic under the house renovation. Maybe that’s for the better.

What was I even originally calling the manuscript?

What coalesced for me was the many dimensions of the word “promise,” including the wedding vow, potential, and what I saw as our Promised Land. And then I had the flash of ending the book on a shocking note.

Well, so had much of my life.

I suspect that I spent far more effort than I’ve thought on the novel that now stands as Nearly Canaan.

Somehow, I even had a round with a real literary agent, who ultimately passed on the project.

During later revisions in New Hampshire, the big blob of material I had in hand turned into three parallel volumes – Promise, Peel (as in apple), and St. Helens in the Mix. And I was wondering about my subsequent engagement and the young woman I thought was a perfect subject for later. (I now see how banal that would have been.)

Would the project have been any easier if I had all the facts rather than empty denials and evasions? What if I had steered this more into the fantasy realm, perhaps having the earth magically speak directly to Jaya? Or broken it into a sequence of short books, each with a sharper focus?

A very bruised journalist, alas, was still at the helm, one still engaged in a difficult, painful exile and trying to report on the facts before me.

~*~

I’m trying to recall books and authors I was reading at the time, especially ones that might have nurtured this project. What comes to mind are Ann Tyler (I can smell the back entry of some homes in her Roland Park section of Baltimore); the Random House Vintage Contemporaries series edited by Gary Fisketjon and writers like Jay McInerney (Ransom more than Bright Lights, Big City) and Tama Janowitz; beyond that, Larry McMurtry, Tom Robbins, and Joan Didion; as well as Calvin Trillin’s U.S. Journal letters from here or there in the New Yorker. I also had John Nichols (Milagro Beanfield Wars), Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion), Edward Abbey, and Ecotopia.

~*~

Promise came out as an ebook at Smashwords but went nowhere. Rather than pay for covers for two companion volumes, I released them as PDF freebies at my Thistle Finch imprint, only to find nobody was downloading anything that big. Ditto for the full-length poetry collections. There would be a major refocusing of the offerings.

Employment is a big thread running through my fiction

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my parallel universe, my real-life life, newspapers were caught up in technological “advances” that kept setting us back. Those changes had started well before my sabbatical break, but they were speeding up. Back when I was starting, perforated teletype tape meant we really couldn’t edit stories we received from the Associated Press or United Press International or similar services. And then scanning of typewritten pages made improving even staff reports physically difficult. After that came the early stages of computer screens and keyboards, where editing took about three times longer than it had with a pencil – moving that cursor around took more effort, certainly, and computer crashes were commonplace. These were all matters that impacted the emerging story of Hometown News, though I believe anyone working in a large business office would have parallel experiences to relate.

We forget how much reliability our laptops and PCs have gained. Does anyone else remember losing a draft to a static electricity spark that then erased whatever was on your screen? Or, for that matter, when it was a bigger power outage?

I could detail the shifts from letterpress and hot type to pasteup and eventually pagination or from typewriters and linotype machines to early computers to, well, the digital devices we have today or from letterpress to offset printing and now digital editions skipping paper altogether.

Or similar leaps in photography, as we see in following Kenzie.

~*~

Paid work occupies a large part of most adult lives. Even when it doesn’t, how we handle our money, wealth, time, and so on is a highly emotional issue, no matter what the dismal science of economics insists. (For that line of useful inquiry, go to the Talking Money series on my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog.)

I just couldn’t create characters without their having jobs. Well, most of them – the hippie farm had some of dubious means.

Besides, so much of a typical male’s identity and life purpose is tied up in his job, especially when he can take pride in it. The job even defines his social circle.

I didn’t want to add another book about a hopeful writer to the literature. What a cliché. Or a musician or actor or even a painter. How about a plumber or fireman or circus clown?

But I still needed a witness figure for the history abstracted to fiction that was before me. I defaulted to using a photographer, in part because I had wished I had taken up a camera, if only I could have afforded the time and a darkroom, blah-blah-blah, and in part because I had been a serious visual artist in high school. You can see those elements developing in Daffodil Uprising and later coming together in What’s Left, but they also play out in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks and Subway Visions. I’m a highly visual guy in my awareness and thinking, OK? The fact he was employed at a newspaper is one part I couldn’t evade.

I still value novelists who manage to set their story outside of the writing world, and that includes universities. Charles Bukowski gets points for me for his novel Post Office. Well, I guess that’s also where genres kick in, too. They’re about detectives and spacemen and billionaires and cowboys and so on.

Photojournalist? At the time of the first draft of Subway Hitchhikers, I didn’t have any models to draw from, but that quickly changed. I wound up working with some of the best in the business.

Over time, photography, the kind that required light meters and F-stops and film and darkrooms, became ancient history. That part I would have to intensely rework and explain as my books underwent revision, thanks to Cassia in What’s Left.

In contrast, Hometown News was primarily about work. I had no problem in this case where everything took place at a newspaper plant, though the economics of the surrounding community also emerged as a central thread.

Jaya became a more difficult case. Her career in the early drafts was drawn from my newspaper offices and hours, now vaguely abstracted to management in general. It would get more specific in the revised titles, where she specializes in nonprofits management. It’s a real job description in a major component of the economy. For that flash of inspiration, I could look to one neighbor in Dover and the impact she had statewide in peace and social justice matters.

Ever feel like an imposter?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

My first brush with the concept came in a hearing a classical musician talk about his arrival in a major symphony orchestra and looking around at all the talent and amazing sound they were creating. “I felt like an imposter,” he said.

Oh, my, I could identify.

Little did I know of the Imposter Syndrome, a term coined by psychologists in the 1970s.

Rather than go into the details and nuances – there are many, look them up if you wish – I’ll mention ten places it hits me.

  1. Music circles. Yup, despite my extensive knowledge of repertoire and so on, I can find myself cowered at times in choir when a technical issue pops up. We’re singing in what key, now that we’ve hit this chord? What do you mean? Or of course I’m supposed to know which Chopin etude that is, not that I play piano.
  2. Books. No matter being a fairly well-read author, there’s no way I can keep up with the output. “Have you read” has a 99.9 percent chance of a negative answer, even in one of my specialty areas. Reading the New York Review makes me feel like a complete ignoramus. How about you?
  3. Poets. At least few other poets or poetry lovers know of the writers I’m most fond of, even the ones considered major figures. Now, what are their best lines?
  4. News events. Forty years in a newsroom and I still can’t follow it all. Local? Regional? National? International? As for the players’ names? Which leads to ….
  5. Politics. A congressman, for one, faces more proposed new legislation than anyone could ever examine. And I’m supposed to be one up? How about city council issues? Like when I’m having a beer once a week with some fine neighbors?
  6. Cambridge. Despite singing in a chorus with a number of Harvard and MIT grads, they are an inside circle. Being told my portrait hangs in one of the dorms on the Yard – I don’t remember which one – only made things worse.
  7. Quakers. There are circles I know but so many more I don’t. As for keeping up with the current reading? Back to books!
  8. People’s names and faces. I’m really at a loss there most of the time. Sorry.
  9. Money dealings. I’m still baffled by our cell phone contract and the monthly bills. As for dealing with car salesmen or realtors? WTF? A guy’s supposed to be savvy with this, right? Well, that leads to truly painful area:
  10. Male role: Yup, capable of repairing anything, solving any problem, knowing just who to contact when needed.

Tell me I’m not alone. Please?

When a fictional scene can use a shot of reality

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While I’m thinking about visuals, let me mention a few ways they’ve helped me in creating my novels.

Not to slight dialogue, even when you nail it, or, for that matter, narrative, but a visual detail can be a great way to spark attention in a character development or a scene. It can make a passage visceral. It can rescue a connecting passage that’s gone flat or leaving you floundering for just the right idea.

I don’t know about you, but my memory overlooks a lot of telling specifics in the history I’m investigating. It’s not just memory, either, but so much that should be obvious but we simply block from awareness. That’s where I’ve found photographs to be a great prompt. Sometimes they even provide data, as my Orphan George blog demonstrates in posts examining family photos, when they’ve been available. Other genealogists can weigh in on ways snapshots and portraits have provided crucial data.

Through many of my moves, I didn’t even have a camera. I have no shots of many of the people who were central in my life, not even some of the lovers or places I’ve inhabited. The shots can counter my tendency to idealize. A bit of grit can restore some reality.

In the process of writing and revising my novels, I began collecting photos from magazines or other sources as prompts. This character in my book (often they’re a compression of several real people) might look like the one in this photo or wear something in that. Or here’s a small-town square that would work. They even allowed me to reconstruct a darkroom for Kenzie.

The Internet, of course, has made this backgrounding much easier.

Let’s be clear, you do judge a book by its cover

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

With my training as an artist, I have some strong feelings about book covers. Most of the ones I see leave me cold. I think they’re too cluttered, and most of them lack a strong graphic element – I prefer a good photograph though am coming around on the painted image argument – and I like a clean, easy to read impression. Some of the typefaces used for the title or the author are nearly impossible to make out.

I did have a friend who was a professional illustrator for a Fortune 500 corporation. CAD (computer assisted design) was overtaking the field, and he felt it was destroying his artist’s hand, the one with the Rhode Island School of Design sharpened skills. His aspiration was to design old-fashioned book jackets, and while his style there wasn’t my cup of tea, I could see its appeal. Fortunately, he conceived a children’s book that took off, in part because it was based on a Pete Seeger song, which did get buyers’ attention. And led to many more all on his own.

I still don’t understand all the nuance, though. Is it true that a certain strand of fantasy is supposed to have a specific element woven into the cover to alert a potential reader that this is the subgenre she’s looking for? You know, maybe a touch of moonlight or a small bat in flight or a golden glimmer in someone’s eye?

I am learning, though. A cover makes a promise with a reader, so I’ve heard at Smashwords.

My thoughts on cover design and some of my favorites appear in earlier posts here at the Red Barn.

Self-publishing requires much more than merely producing a compelling text.

Naming a book is hard enough. For the record, I found naming What’s Left to be my most difficult, as I’ll explain in a future post.

In the world of books, and not just ebooks, a strong cover is crucial.

If you can afford to hire an illustrator or graphic artist to design yours great. I’m envious.

My first novel, in paper, wound up with an “art designer” misfire. Rather than respecting the black-and-white photo of passengers in a subway car, a flat yellow lotus shape was cut into the image with the title and author credits inside that field. It didn’t fly. In addition, my name wasn’t left as simply Jnana, as I desired. It was the full yoga version, an additional five syllables or 14 letters. Well, it kinda has a 1950s feel, even with some graffiti on its walls, but the action was all high hippie ‘60s and early ‘70s. I’m now wondering if getting a tagger to do the cover would have been a more successful alternative. I’m sensing it would have been a more in-your-face result. Buy me now!

For my first round at Smashwords, I hired a book designer who was, I seem to recall, living in the Czech Republic. Emailing made everything easier, including paying him via PayPal, which was new to me. Since he had a deal with a stock agency for low-cost photos, I rifled through its online pages filled with shots that might fit my need.

It’s harder than you’d think.

A good cover isn’t a poster. It’s more like a billboard on a much smaller scale. And your potential readers are zipping by.

The right photo turns out to be a rarity. It has to somehow reflect the story and still attract a buyer.

Even when you find a good fit, there can be problems. For instance, the photo I settled on for Hippie Drum was a black-and-white portrait of a shirtless young male playing a set of Conga drums. It even looked a lot like me at the time of the story. Little did I know how many viewers it repulsed.

There is debate over showing a person’s face on the cover. It can limit a reader’s perception of your central character, for one thing, and one reader’s ideal can be an instant rejection from another.

If you’re going the human face route, you may find the perfect photo with one slight flaw. She’s a redhead while your character’s brunette. It may be easier to tweak the book to fit the cover.

The experience of tweaking a character to fit the cover image.

There’s also a debate over a painted or drawn artwork versus a photograph.

When I got around to designing my own covers, I came upon a drawn image of a single daffodil bloom. How perfect and I still love it. And within the title I inserted a peace emblem for an “O” in DAFFODIL SUNRISE.

A few years later, when I changed the title, that cover went out of circulation. That peace emblem just didn’t work with the new version’s Kindle print-on-demand cover, either.

I have to admit a special fondness to the ones on Subway Visions, Yoga Bootcamp, and the Secret Side of Jaya – none of them photos.

Memories of places in the town I grew up in

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve mentioned a few others, such as the art museum, in other posts here. Now, to add a few more, in no particular order. Again, I’m looking at Greater Dayton rather than strictly inside the city limits.

  1. NCR: The National Cash Register Company’s world headquarters looked more like an open college campus with linden trees and pristine lawns than an industrial jumble behind barbed wire and hurricane fencing. It even had a fine auditorium and pipe organ, used for its gatherings of salesmen but also the concerts of the Civic Music Association – I heard a number of famed musicians there. And I was awarded my Eagle Scout badge and later my high school diploma on its stage. And, oh yes, I can’t overlook Old River, the employee park with the lagoon and boating, a fine miniature golf course, and a huge outdoor swimming pool – when one of my buddies whose father worked at NCR and thus had a pass to the park asked if I wanted to go, there was only one possible answer. Please!
  2. The corner display windows at Rikes department store: The pioneering retailer was the place to shop in town, and anytime we took the bus, say to the library or a movie, we’d wind up checking the latest display – especially at Christmas. During my senior year, some of my art work was used in the background of the featured fashion.
  3. The YMCA: I learned to swim at the indoor pool and sometimes applied my allowance to a grilled cheese sandwich later, over on the men’s side. And then, little kid that I was, I enjoyed the freedom of taking the bus home on my own.
  4. Frigidaire employee park: Thanks to my best friend’s father’s employee pass, we spent many summer nights enjoying free Starlight movies. My dad worked for another General Motors division in town, one that had no such benefits.
  5. Troop trails: My Boy Scout troop had a long hike one Sunday a month, in addition to a primitive camping weekend. Our routes often followed a river or crossed farmlands or even trekked along railroad tracks. I remember especially a few that traced the abandoned Miami-Erie Canal with its mule bank and its eerie remains of limestone locks left in vines and trees.
  6. Suicide Hill: A decent snowfall (quite modest by what I’ve experienced since) meant sledding at Hills and Dales Park. How insignificant the slope looks now, but there were some serious injuries. I had a near call.
  7. Memorial Hall: It really wasn’t designed for concerts, but it’s where the Philharmonic performed, and since my dad had access to tickets, I heard many top soloists. Hard to believe now, actually.
  8. Our big ugly high school: built in the 1960s and long since torn down. In my memory, I recall it more than the older but equally ugly elementary school.
  9. Yellow Springs: Once I got my driver’s license, the bohemian town in Greene County, home of Antioch College, became a welcome retreat. Its funky stores, before funky was a word in my consciousness, were mind-expanding. Nowhere else could we find Earl Grey or gunpowder tea or sticks of incense or perfumed soaps. Then there was the professional summer theater series at the amphitheater, itself a revelation. By that time, I was in love, at last. And that leads to mention of a covered bridge by moonlight: Yes, making out afterward in the moonlight at a covered bridge that’s no longer existent down an unpaved road.
  10. The Art Theater: Where I first saw foreign films, black-and-white alternatives to Hollywood’s commercial concoctions. And then there was the Lemon Tree coffee house next door with its folk music and blues.

My, all that was a world ago in my life.

 

Now, for standing on my head

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m not sure when or where I began drafting my yoga novel or where, but I know the bones were in place before I began my self-declared sabbatical in 1986-87. Perhaps it was during my month of unemployment before landing in Baltimore. For one thing, I had revisited the ashram in the year before my big writing spree and perhaps even driven past it the previous year. I was hoping to get some answers for questions regarding my manuscript must say the encounter was unsettling. I wasn’t even allowed inside the center, and the woman who had taken over as guru declared herself too busy to say hi. A deputy was dispatched for that, with tea, while I sat beside Swami’s grave.

Well, that was a perk of being “on the road” as a newspaper features salesman, otherwise known as “field representative.” I even got my name in brochures and full-color ads in the industry magazine Editor & Publisher.

My ashram residency a dozen or so years earlier had been life-changing, but the connection broke completely when I relocated to the Pacific Northwest in 1976. Swami had demanded a large chunk of my meagre salary, and besides, I was newly married with a wife in college. The upshot, quite simply, was that I felt ostracized. I was certainly shunned it that social call. In the bigger picture, the yoga movement itself had gone into eclipse and my own spiritual journey had resettled in the Quaker vein.

Still, the yoga life in America was a largely untold story, even if it had put “karma” and “om” into the American vocabulary and mindset.

When I began drafting the book, I had no idea where everyone had scattered and had no way of contacting them. I mean, if I was ostracized, what was the point of contacting the headquarters? Did I even know that Swami had died? Perhaps, though some communication I had with someone who had been a regular guest and went from being a rock-band manager to a Messianic Christian comedian. I managed to make that connection through a wire-service news story I came across before my leap to Baltimore. So now I’m thinking the yoga novel originated even earlier than I’d thought. (I really do need to sit down with my journals for a very deep dive.)

I do see that some of the outtakes from Subway Hitchhikers were woven into what became my second published book, Adventures on a Yoga Farm, which came out as pioneering PDF ebook from PulpBits.com in 2005.

~*~

What do you do with a rogue outfit like ours? I definitely wanted to avoid the sticky sweet guru worship I’d seen in other books, and I definitely wanted to avoid a scandal-mongering expose, though I would later find that nearly all of the religious imports from Asia would face financial or sexual embarrassment. Michael Downing’s 2002 Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center would cover that reality in one of the more prominent and, up till then, respectable organizations.

When I sat down to write my novel, I decided to stick to one day in the community’s life. I created a composite of eight young yogis and their woman swami guru. Each resident student represented a different stage of development. It also involved compressing the two years of my experience into a single day. I’m guessing the one-day focus reflected the Greek theater ideal.

And I do stand by my original structure of eight disciples within a single day.

The book was republished via Smashwords in 2013, this time with more popular platform choices than PDF. My, have times changed.

What I really wanted, I think, was my own version of Be Here Now.

I don’t think I could have adequately presented the inner turmoil of a charismatic leader without a college degree now having a tiger by the tail much less uncovered all that got covered up in the frenzy.

Would anyone really care?

On former girlfriends and lovers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For me, this is ancient history, back before my second marriage more than two decades ago. Still, I get questioned about my deep past, and sometimes that has me looking at my previous romances and adventures collectively, rather than individually.

Here’s the latest take.

  1. None of them were like my mother, as far as I can see. There are good reasons for that.
  2. I was attracted to potential. As in “promise,” which was the original title of my novel now standing as Nearly Canaan.
  3. I put them up on pedestal. Up there, beside mine.
  4. Most were intelligent, though not always of a scholarly bent, as well as attractive.
  5. I am having trouble seeing deep mutual interests. Spirituality, especially along Quaker lines, classical music, and literature are central pursuits of mine, and being with someone who shared even one of those felt like Eureka. Contradancing worked as a connector for several of them. But for the rest?
  6. There are now questions of just exactly what I offered them. How often was I trying to be the white knight coming to their rescue?
  7. They were all younger than me. (Not that I’d advise that.)
  8. Were they all crazy, one way or another? That has been suggested. And, no, I don’t see myself as a victim.
  9. Except for a couple of them, I doubt they’ve ever visited this blog or read anything else I’ve written in the years since we were together.
  10. These things rarely end well. As in happily ever after.